Page 30 of The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels
AF:Not physically, but traumatised.
AB:Holly still had the baby with her at that point?
AF:Yes. They’d checked it over and it was fine, so … I think social services made a decision about the infant later, but you try to keep a baby with its mother.
AB:Of course. What did you think had gone on?
AF:They said she’d been found sleeping rough with the baby and that the baby’s father was with police at a crime scene. Minimal details, as usual. They asked me to reunite them, so the family could be taken to social services as one unit. All pretty ordinary at first.
AB:When did it occur to you it was out of the ordinary?
AF:Holly was on the back seat with the child. I didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl. Asked its name. She said: ‘It doesn’t need one.’
AB:How old was it? Had it just been born …?
AF:It looked one to two months at most.
AB:How did you react when she said it didn’t have a name?
AF:It wasn’t my place to judge. She had obviously been through a trauma but I knew social services were involved anyway. Didn’t have to escalate my concerns at that point. So, I acted normal. When we stopped at traffic lights, I looked over my shoulder, said what a sweet little thing it was, and ‘look at the peaceful expression on its face’. [A pause here, either she’s having trouble remembering or the memory is a difficult one. EC] I can see that look in her eyes now, all this time later. ‘It isn’t peaceful,’ she said, ‘it’s evil. It’ll destroy the world, and no one can stop it.’ [Bet this cop needed a coffee and doughnut after that. EC]
AB:Well …
AF:Yeah, exactly. I hadn’t had kids myself then, but I knew there was a type of post-natal depression where new mothers believe their baby’s evil. So, radar pinged.
AB:Post-partum psychosis?
AF:That’s it … So I wasn’t going to leave her alone till she was with a social worker and responsibility for the kid was in someone else’s hands. It sounds harsh, but you get to thinking like that. Despitewhat she said, Holly was behaving in an instinctive, maternal way – holding the baby, rocking it, settling it. That reassured me.
AB:What happened when you got to the warehouse?
AF:I was one-up that day, so couldn’t leave Holly in the car—
AB:One-up?
AF:On my own in the patrol car. We would usually be rostered in pairs, but there were too many off. I would’ve preferred Holly to stay in the car, but like I said, I wasn’t about to leave her alone with the baby. I asked her to come into the warehouse with me to ‘meet up with the baby’s dad’. That’s all the information I had at that point. I opened the door, offered to hold it while she got out. She wouldn’t budge. ‘It’s still the alignment,’ she said. ‘They’ll take it.’ I reassured her no one was going to touch that baby while I was there. But she was adamant.
AB:The alignment.
AF:An alignment of stars or something. The cult were going to sacrifice a baby at a particular alignment of planets. That’s my understanding.
AB:Do you think they were really going to kill it, or was it all part of the … [You grapple for words. EC] world they created for Holly and Jonah?
AF:I think they were really going to kill it. I do. Well, most of them killed themselves when they failed. That’s how brainwashed they were.
AB:How did you resolve the impasse with Holly?
AF:I spotted a female officer and asked her to watch the girl while I collected Jonah.
AB:What was her name, can you remember?
AF:It was pretty. French. Something like Marie-Claire.
AB:She’s not on my list. No one has mentioned a Marie-Claire as a serving officer at the time.
AF:I didn’t know her then and haven’t met her since, so … Anyway, I called her over to explain, but Holly started screaming, saying Marie-Claire had to stay away. That she was ‘one of them’. I said, ‘One of who?’ and Holly said, ‘A dark angel.’
AB:What did Marie-Claire say to that?
